The proposed studies are concerned with the effects of cognitive development (indexed by age) and cumulative television viewing experience on children's capacities to understand and recall televised content requiring different levels of processing. The auditory and visual production features which constitute the form and structure of a program and serve to organize content for the "media literate" viewer will be studied as relatively content-free events that the child can use in 4 ways. 1) As segmental markers which help break content into logical units by signalling transitions to new content. 2) As modifiers of messages through their association in television production with certain kinds of content which become their connotative meanings. 3) As determinants and signals of the level of processing offered or required by programs of different formats, levels which then determine how children will respond to other salient features -- as entertaining events for passive consumption or as clues in their active search for more integrative meaning. 4) As aids, through visual and verbal "replays" of key events, to the deeper processing of more complex and abstract content, aids to representation, and aids to rehearsal. These 4 uses of formal features will be evaluated in four series of cross-sectional lab studies of children aged 3 to 11. Using a developmental model that attributes the development of perceptual search to familiarization and experience, and that of logical search to cognitive maturation, the project will also measure home viewing histories of 3-to 7-year-olds longitudinally in 2 cohorts over 2 years: 3-5 and 5-7. Patterns of home viewing will be used 1) to test the developmental model of changing tastes and levels of processing, 2) to analyze how current home viewing data are related to, and can be used to index probable viewing history in cross-sectional data, and 3) as the main independent variable in replications of the four types of lab studies described above, to be carried out on the "surviving alumni" of the longitudinal studies, whose home viewing histories at ages 5 and 7 will thus be known.